Young Malatesta grew to be a fine, high-spirited soldier of the Duke’s bodyguard.  Loyal to the core to his master, and ambitious for the honour of his family, no enterprise was beyond his scope, no obstacle insurmountable.  Intercourse between the princes and princesses and himself became naturally less familiar, but the affections of early boy and girlhood are not easily dissipated; and so Malatesta de’ Malatesti and Maria de’ Medici found, but, alas, for their woe and not for their weal!

Whilst boys and young men in Florence were free to come and go as they liked, and to mix with all sorts and conditions of men and women, the case was precisely the opposite for girls.  Very especially severe were the restrictions imposed upon the growing daughters of the Duchess Eleanora.  Brought up amid all the austerity and fanaticism of the Spanish Court, Eleanora de Toledo viewed woman’s early life from the conventual point of view.

Jealous of her children’s honour, she fenced her three daughters around with precautions which rendered their lives irksome to themselves and troublesome to all who were about them.  Maria and her younger sisters were literally shut up within the narrow limits of the apartments they occupied in the palace—­happily for them it was not the Palazzo Vecchio but the more roomy Pitti, with its lovely Boboli Gardens.

With carefully chosen attendants and teachers, their lives were entirely absorbed by religious exercises, studies, and needlework.  Rarely were they seen at Court functions, and rarer still in the city.  If they were allowed a day’s liberty in the country, they were jealously guarded, and every attempt at recognition and salutation, of such as they chanced to meet, was rigorously checked.

Beyond association with their brothers, and anxiously watched intercourse with the members of the Ducal suite, their knowledge of the sterner sex was absolutely wanting.  It was in vain that Cosimo expostulated with his consort; she was inexorable, and, indeed, she stretched her system so far as to exclude the ladies of the Court.  Perhaps she was right in this, for the Duke himself was the daily object of her watchfulness!

Cosimo was wont to meet her restrictions by some such remark as “Well, you see, Eleanora, Maria and Isabella are of the same complexion as myself; we have need of freedom at times to enjoy the pleasures of the world.”

Love, we all know, cares neither for locks nor bars, and lovely young Maria de’ Medici was surely made to love and to caress.  She had many adorers, whose ardour was all the more fierce by reason of their inability to press her hand and kiss her lips.  She was in 1556 betrothed to Prince Alfonso d’Este, eldest son of the Duke of Ferrara.  He was certainly not in the category of lovers, even at sight, for he had never seen his bride to be.  That was an entirely unimportant incident in matrimonial arrangements.  The union was projected entirely for political reasons, and chiefly for the putting an end to the protracted contest for precedence between the two families, which every now and again threatened to plunge all Italy into war.